Beacon of Enlightenment

A bold paradigm shift towards change over growth, with smaller classes and a premium student experience, will be the future for the University of Adelaide.

Championed by Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Warren Bebbington, the new direction is outlined in the University of Adelaide's new 10-year Strategic Plan: Beacon of Enlightenment launched on 3 December.

"We have drawn a line in the sand. We've said that we will focus on transforming our great university and build on its already formidable reputation in learning and research, rather than continuing to grow exponentially," said Professor Bebbington.

"In the past decade we have doubled in size. That kind of student enrolment growth is simply not sustainable for a landlocked university. Nor do we want our students to feel like they are part of a mass-produced education system, with overflowing lecture theatres and minimal, or no access, to our outstanding academic staff."

Instead, the University of Adelaide will "commit to a distinctive new approach rather than growth," said Vice- Professor Bebbington, while pointing to the alternative drift towards massive enrolments and 'dumbed-down' content over the past 20 years in Australian and UK universities and the subsequent risk to quality higher education.

The ideal of the modern university, the union of teaching and research has been lost," he said. "The highlight was individual discovery but sadly research is now almost absent from undergraduate courses."

Under the new Strategic Plan, from 2013 every University of Adelaide course will move towards "small-group discovery," in which all students will gain skills of analysis, criticism, expert search and written communications essential to independent enquiry.

For the highest-achieving students, every Faculty will offer an Advanced Bachelor program, featuring independent research work from first-year.

In developing the Strategic Plan, Professor Bebbington was acutely aware of the changing expectations of today's students.

"My memory of university as an under-graduate is of marvellous inspiring professors who challenged me and fuelled my curiosity and love of learning. They influenced my whole life. You can't create that kind of experience in a class of 1000 or 1500 students," he said. "And we have to accept that students learn differently than they did even 10 years ago."

"Today, we are now seeing two kinds of students at the University of Adelaide. The first group values higher education, having done well at secondary school. Yet they are likely to already be in the workforce, often juggling lectures and with full-time jobs. They want quality teaching, flexible contact hours, highly accessible learning tools and a fast, direct route to a career.

"Another group is looking for an intensive and highly-challenging learning experience that exploits their deeper sense of inquiry and sets them on a trajectory to further research study. These very high-achieving students have an insatiable hunger to learn and soak up every available learning opportunity on campus, and online.

"Each group has different needs and we have to respond accordingly."

The University of Adelaide will also treble expenditure on digital and online learning support, which all students now expect. "Where content can be delivered online with pedagogic integrity, it will be," said Professor Bebbington. But face-to-face classes, especially in small groups, will increase.

"Adelaide will remain a campus university, for the scholarship of discovery involves personalised learning which happen best face-to-face."

There will also be a massive increase in work experience and in study abroad, with all students expected to undertake at least one of these. Travel grants will be introduced to help with the costs of going abroad, to "prepare students for global citizenship in a near border less world," he said.

In the research space, the University will recapture the sentiment of its founding fathers in recruiting the very best researchers from around the world, ready to adapt to new challenges.

"Attracting high-impact professors with a strong track record in published citations will help to reinforce our existing core research strengths," said Professor Bebbington.

Improved standing in the international rankings is also on the agenda.

"Flawed as they may be, international university rankings are here to stay," said Professor Bebbington. One of the targets outlined in the Strategic Plan will be for the University of Adelaide to achieve a rating of 150 or higher in the ARWU (Shanghai Jiao Tong) rankings by 2024.
To help reach this target, the University will develop new research partnerships where it can find partners of equal or better strength, and where the whole partnership is demonstrably greater than the sum of the parts.

"With an increased emphasis on establishing strengthened partnerships with industry and government in Australian and overseas, the University will work towards augmenting its overall research capability.

"Global collaboration is absolutely critical," he said. "The opportunities to magnify our output through carefully targeted partnerships are significant."

While most universities set their sights on a five year plan, Professor Bebbington was determined to create a strategic roadmap that would provide the vision and space to work transform the University of Adelaide into Australia's most distinctive university, in Australia's most civilised of cities.

"We have had four months of consultation inside and outside the university," he said. "There is a groundswell of support for having at least one Group of Eight university abandon endless growth and return to the teaching/research ideal of the modern university.

"Given its history, current standing and the calibre and loyalty of its staff, I have no doubt that Adelaide will fulfil every single one of its aspirations."

The Founding Vision

The University of Adelaide was founded with a noble goal: to prepare for South Australia young leaders shaped by education rather than by birth or wealth. The university would reflect the values of South Australia itself-a distinctively progressive and democratic way of life, in a settlement free of Old World social and religious inequalities.

That this would stamp on the University a spirit of free inquiry was the dream of its first Vice- Chancellor, one of Adelaide's pioneers, Dr Augustus Short (1802-1883). Short had studied and taught at Christ Church Oxford; one of his pupils had been future British Prime Minister William Gladstone. But instead of Oxford's narrow classics curriculum, Short wanted a University open to investigation of new fields-the sciences, modern literature, art and moral philosophy among them. Also unlike Oxford, where religious texts had prevailed, the university would be secular: there would not be church-owned residential colleges on campus, as at the universities at Sydney and Melbourne; Adelaide's spirit would be of liberty and discovery, immune from intolerance or external influence.

Thus Adelaide forged a new frontier in higher education--one that broke from the privilege and traditions of Britain's ancient universities. Scholarships were offered for competition by any South Australian resident, regardless of background. The first students were not the sons of wealthy British gentry but the locally-born middle class, and before long included women, who took degrees at Adelaide 40 years before they could at Oxford.

The professors were recruited internationally, and one, Sir William Bragg, won the Nobel Prize in Physics (with his son Sir Lawrence). The initial funds for chairs and key buildings came from donors, and Short sought public supporters by demonstrating the University's value to the community through public open days, fora, and long-running evening public lectures.

Thus were formed Adelaide's distinctive features: a student body of democratic breadth, a staff of international distinction, a spirit of freedom to investigate new fields, a sense of importance to the community, and a goal to prepare educated leaders. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the graduates continued to become educated leaders, and eventually one-Howard Florey-led the isolation of penicillin, perhaps the most important scientific discovery ever made by an Australian. It was a dazzling climax to the University's founding era.